Question the Cartoonist

The Shadowcist

Before discussing today’s strip, I feel I need to define a term. As I’ve said elsewhere, Brittany draws, and I ink. Except that I don’t ink. Inking requires…you know…ink. I do everything in photoshop, so ink doesn’t really come into it. There is, of course, the term digital inking which would be perfectly fine except for one little fact. Kevin Smith-inspired jokes about tracers aside, I have great respect for inkers. They have great artistic skills and to call oneself an inker (or digital inker) is to
lay claim to those skills.

I am making no such claim.

Therefore, digital inking doesn’t really apply. It’s too long, anyway. We need something shorter that rolls off the tongue. Therefore, I would like to introduce the following term:

d’ink – verb, to digitally ink a comic or other image…badly.

There…I think I can feel comfortable with that term.

So, back to today’s strip. Some time ago, I told Brittany that she would be responsible for one script a month based on her tendency to make anime jokes. She came up with a bunch of ideas, and pre-sketched several. This was one of the first drawings, and it has been sitting waiting until she felt it was time.

The thing is, when she sent it to me, I said no because we had already run this strip. She said that we hadn’t, so I checked the archives, and no, we hadn’t. However, I was sure that I had d’inked this strip before, so I thought maybe I had snagged it from her folder and ran it over on the regular blog. Nope…nothing there either. But again, I was sure I had d’inked it, so I checked all of the workstations I d’ink at, but it was not to be found. I then checked all of my online image repositories…nope.

Weird, but clearly an old-timers moment, so I started the d’inking process. It was about half-way through the second panel that the feeling that I had d’inked it before changed to a feeling that I tried d’inking it and stopped because it was too hard. That’s a real possibility. On the plus side, I had no problem d’inking it now (within the confines of my restricted abilities), so I’ll take that as growth. I’ll have to put this one on the pile to fully color though as with Shadow, Sonic and Knuckles, it screams for a bit of color!